Blogs

Google Merchant Center

For a long time now Google has been more than just a search engine. Keeping abreast of their new products can be a challenging task. We will bring you an overview of a few of the most important.

Google & E-commerce

So if you sell products how can Google help you?

Product Listing Ads appear can appear on the standard google.co.uk search results page in the ad words unit on the right-hand bar together with other ads. Product Listing Ads are labelled as ‘sponsored’.

Your products can also appear on Google Shopping (google.co.uk/shopping) pages. Shoppers can compare products and make purchases directly from your website or shop.

Ok your adverts will appear when someone searches for your products – which is good as they are probably intending to make a purchase but as soon as someone clicks on your advert you will have to pay for it.

Google Merchant Center

If all this sounds good to you and you want to start selling on google then you are going to need to sign up to the Google Merchant Center – you have to get over the fact that Google has a problem spelling Center.

If you already have an account with Google (like Gmail), visit google.com/merchants and sign in to get started.

If you do not already have a Google account, visit google.com/merchants and click “Create an account now”. You will be prompted to enter a sign in email and password, as well as the some basic information about you, to create a Google Merchant Center account. All sounds easy but then they go and ask for a data feed in an xml feed or a text feed.

Data feed

You could stop here and bring your webs developers in – but the xml feed can be just an RSS feed (1.0 or 2.0). Full information on the feed can be found on the following link https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160589?hl=en&ref_topic=2473799 . If you have seen an RSS feed before you will see that it has 4 additional attributes (image_link, price, condition, and id).

Well that is a brief overview – want to know more give us a ring and pop in for a chat.